Star Wars - Recidivist
by Omit
Summary: It is the better part of a thousand years before the Battle of Yavin. In the throes of a depression wracking the Republic, increasing numbers are forced to the lower levels of Coruscant, away from the prying eyes of its governance - the body of which may well have the tendrils of corruption pervading it. A lone death stick junkie finds herself in circumstances far beyond her...
1. Chapter 1

It was hard to believe that, this far down, there was still a place where rain could reach.

Evaa watched the drips of acidic precipitation - probably more rusted flecks of durasteel and emitted fuel particles and who knows what else than actual H2O - slowly fall in even, long intervals from above her in the alleyway to land in a small puddle at her outstretched feet as the last bout of euphoria slowly drained from her. The water must have carved its way over millennia to reach this far. Down the gutters on the surface level where the nobles' and politicians' sleek modernist penthouses reached into the hazy Coruscant sky, into the storm drains on the streets of the mid levels where civilians walked or drove, into the sewers, finding its way through a rusted socket in a pipe perhaps and slowly eroding a path through the already-weak structures of the lower levels, and finally flowing down here, into the undercity, where it would likely find its way through rats' digestive systems, exposing them to the runoff's toxic buildup of chemicals that were to blame for the underlife's poor health and propensity to mutate. And then, who knows, maybe down to the planet's true surface - though it was strange to believe that it even existed.

Through metal just as earth; just as natural processes had carved out the shape of billions of planets in the Galaxy, so too the cycle continued here on Coruscant. The rain didn't care - and neither did the trillion people living miles above, most of whom had long since forgotten about the layers of ages-old structures that their planet-spanning city had been built on top of.

The empty syringe was still clutched in her hand tightly. Evaa let out a long breath, relaxing the muscles that had been clenched in pleasure throughout the effects of the initial high of the death stick. That had been the largest dose she had ever tried. And she was alive. Not that she felt joy or even relief at that prospect; alive had just become a state between highs, where she toiled every hour, sleepless, to work up enough credits to buy the next hit, which had been going up in size along with her tolerance to the toxic-but-euphoric chemicals and the prices of them thereof. She didn't know how much longer she could possibly keep this up. At this point she had to make a week's worth of rent per day to feed the addiction. Not that she had any actual rent to pay, so there was that.

She slowly stood up, careful not to allow any muscles to cramp. The more noticeable after-effects of the high would continue to last for ten hours – probably more now due to the size of the dose. Even now she still felt the liquid gold of the chemicals still coursing through her veins, the delicious warmth and comfort and tingling sensation along her skin still making the corners of her lips twitch slightly in a semblance of a smile. She didn't want to think about what would happen after the grace period of the after-effects, when she would be naked again, alone with the pain of… existing, really. If she went more than a day without injecting more, she would get terribly sick with the effects of withdrawal. She had experienced that before, on a day when credits had been particularly hard to come by, and the absolute torture had had her begging on her knees to Dint for a hit, anything, a tenth gram. He'd yielded, giving her a small dose on the provision that she'd pay it back later. No doubt he knew that keeping her hooked, not letting her fully withdraw, was far more profitable than the alternative. Evaa spat out sour saliva, holding the sore, bruise-pocked arm she had injected into, face contorting into disgust at the thought of that horned devil. Even though she knew she'd be crawling back to him again before tomorrow.

She'd better get moving. The underlife had a nasty tendency to increase their boldness and likelihood to descend on prey the longer that a potential quarry stayed put, and in their hiding places in the veritable maze of tunneling roads and jagged, rusty durasteel edges that was their territory and home, they certainly held a home-field advantage against her. Especially since she had sold her blaster for drug money and was now essentially defenseless. While the Undercity was a fantastic place to duck into to escape authorities - who these days rarely ventured down farther than the upper low levels, leaving everything below for crime and destitution to fester in - it was dangerous to stay long without a holdout. As much as she enjoyed being one of the rats for a few hours. They never had to worry about policemen or gangs or money, just the instinctual urge to survive and reproduce. Such a lifestyle, while tough, almost seemed liberating to her right now.

She stepped over the puddle of water to stand in the middle of the alleyway, looking up. It was dark, of course. While the alley went up far without obstruction, eventually the open air gave way to cover from another building built over the top of the narrow gap. She was thousands of levels below the surface. The building above was probably rusted out and abandoned, perhaps minus rats and squatters, much as all the buildings on this level.

She stood there for many minutes more, staring up, watching the drip fall down intermittently. Ten, twenty, forty drips into the pool beside her as she counted absentmindedly. Then, she turned and walked out towards the empty and dark main thoroughfare of the ancient level towards her next hit.


	2. Chapter 2

The state of the Coruscant lower-mid levels had not improved while Evaa had been gone. Dirty streets gave passage to a crowd of sentients visibly well under the Galactic Poverty Line, cloaked in garments that gave away the almost ghetto nature of this level. Unfashionable clothes reigned uncontested in the clothing market of the lower levels; ruddy work clothes for factory workers, stained second hand cloaks of women and children, dirty synthleather boots, nearly all articles pocked with patches and holes. Above her, poorly-maintained neon signs glowed feebly, often missing a few darked-out Aurebesh characters, as they advertised cheap wares from stands that were hanging on to business about as well as the people in the thoroughfare were hanging onto their rapidly shrinking (both in quantity and value) credits. Sentients of all species, from Human to Duros to Ishi Tib to those Evaa didn't even know the name of, manned the stands, mirroring the diversity of the crowd, which had a smell that was as much an offensive mixture of wildly differing, but nearly all more or less repelling, body odors as one could imagine from such a starkly heterogenous and poorly hygienically maintained rabble. The occasional run-down protocol droid, programmed to yell advertisements in a few different languages, stood stiffly next to a stand. As she watched passing by, an old spindly-limbed Czerka model calling in outdated dialects for patrons to check his master's deals on used datapads began to stutter, and eventually glitched out violently, its voice pitch veering wildly low to high as the lights behind its photoreceptors flashed in a rhythm playing off that of the Ryl word it had become stuck on - "functioning", as Evaa recognized it, in regards to the condition it alleged its wares to be in. The Selkath manning the stand angrily stalked over from where he had been making a deal with an interested Feeorin and knocked the droid in the head with the butt end of the datapad he had been in the process of getting rid of. Far from fixing the droid, the blow simply disrupted its rigid balance and it came tumbling to the ground with a crash that would have been loud if not for the relativity provided by the surrounding bustle; it laid on the permacrete ground, now silent, the rusted behind of its chasis now visible. The Feeorin took a brief glance at the wares he had been about to purchase from and quietly shuffled away, dissolving into the crowd as the Selkath turned to find his potential patron gone. The aquatic salesman sat down heavily on a nearby crate and put his fishy head in his slender-fingered hands, the droid now smoking from its processing core before him.

Evaa extracted herself from the scene and continued her search through the crowd. This was the central bazaar of this sector, and had been her prime hunting ground for targets for the past several months, and it had proven itself rife with prizes, if only one could have the patience and sleight of hand to earn them. It would not have been her first choice, of course, if not for the fact that it was the largest hub in the area on low enough levels to be almost entirely free of meddling by Republic law enforcement, but still high enough to have pickings that could fetch a decent enough price. It was almost amazing to her what she had been able to get away with down here; she'd once been able to live for a week off the proceeds of an entire speeder that she had quite literally simply walked up to in broad synthlight, sliced open the repulsorlock with a similarly full crowd walking by bearing full witness, and driven off with, with no recourse whatsoever from any authorities. The civilians turned eyes atrophied by apathy blindly away from crime; it was a fact of life here. Who was going to catch the perpetrators, the Republic? They were a mile above, debating in comfortable Senate platforms about ways to resolve their massive debt, their administrative forces stretched thin across the planet and the Galaxy at large. That was as likely a prospect as a Jedi coming down from the Temple and healing the sick child coughing in her mother's arms as Evaa walked past.

With sharp eyes, she spotted it. A boulbous-headed Bith was standing near an alleyway, busking fruitlessly for credits in a black orchestral uniform pointlessly clean in the dirty streets. He played a kloo horn, as polished and shiny as the uniform, the pegs flashing intermittently from between the alien's practiced fingers. The notes, short of bending slyly into and out of blue notes as from the fingers and mouth of a seasoned jizz player, were choked into submission by the crowd and the noise, uncaring for sweet sounds in such a sour environment. Evaa found her way through the crowd, pushing aggressively as she had learned long ago was necessary for accomplishing anything on the lower levels, to make herself the sole audience member in front of the Bith, only receiving a single shove in return along the way from an angry Bothan. Planting her feet in a respectful stance and folding her arms, she made a face of intent listening watching the Bith's fingers go. Invigorated slightly from receiving an audience, the Bith's stance loosened a bit from respectful and proper to begin moving with the music. A confident note struck up above the crowd, and he deftly transitioned from a ballad to a more upbeat tune. Evaa made a smile at him, and he reciprocated with a fluorish. As far as Coruscanti buskers went, he wasn't the worst she'd heard; not bad.

The final turnaround to the tune came, and the Bith ended it with a tricky run that he only slightly stumbled on. Evaa clapped politely, grinned; the musician bowed. He had the horn's case set out in front of him in hopes of tips, only populated now with a couple lonely credit chips, more than likely placed there by the Bith himself in suggestion. Evaa reached into her pocket and took out a single chip, her sole remaining one containing only two or three credits plus some change, and dropped it into the case. The Bith made a thanks in his native language; before he could begin another tune, Evaa made a suggestive step forward, inviting conversation, and gestured, an admiring look of interest on her face. After a moment, he returned the gesture.

"That was great. It's good to have some upbeat music down here." She almost croaked that first sentence, her vocal cords rough with disuse, but recovered quickly and slid into a friendly conversational tone. She reached out her hand to shake his, and the Bith obliged, dual opposing digits wrapping around her small, calloused hand.

"Thank you, thank you," he replied in inhuman tones. He withdrew his hand and once again placed it on the kloo horn, fingering a scale out absentmindedly.

"I heard you playing that Yo Snootles tune and I had to come over. She's one of my favorites."

"Yes! Her version of that tune is seminal, if I may say so. I'm glad you enjoyed."

"I did, very much. You know, I play the kloo, a bit, on and off, which is why I was impressed to see another player."

"Oh really?" he delightedly replied, the sensory folds above the small hole in his face that could be called a "mouth" moving perhaps in what could be his species's equivalent of a smile. "Always wonderful to meet another admirer of the instrument."

"Do you play much around here?"

The Bith looked down forlornly at his horn, placing his fingers wistfully into position in a lower octave. "Unfortunately, no. I just recently moved to Coruscant from Alderaan, where I attended the Aldera School of Music... housing prices are high there, you know..."

Evaa listened politely, nodding her head at key points, as after some verbal nudging the Bith launched into a description of the sorry state of the music scene on Coruscant and his issues paying off his student loans. Evaa casually eyed the kloo horn as she shifted to an open, amiable stance, mirroring slightly the rambling musician's body language. As she gently urged him into an account on his upbringing on Clak'dor VII listening to the kloo horn greats and attempting to emulate them on an old horn that had once belonged to his grandfather, she glanced over at a second case sitting on the rusty bench behind them.

"... and I was able to purchase this beauty, my first real horn, a few years ago... thankfully just before the Relapse."

Eva nodded, meeting his huge glassy black eyes. "So that's the only horn you own?" she asked, coolly shifting her feet to press her weight on her left leg, head calked slightly to the side.

"Oh, no," the Bith responded. "A musician would be remiss not to have a backup, even with such a well-functioning specimen as this one..." He fondly clicked a few pegs on the horn in his hands, then continued. "No, I have another - in fact, it is my old one, my grandfather's, refurbished of course. I have it here with me." He turned and gestured to the long durasteel case on the bench behind him.

"Well, no way," Evaa remarked, inflecting laughter into the words and grinning. "It still plays?"

"Better than ever before," he declared, folds again flexing.

"I don't believe it. You should play a tune on it."

"A fine idea." He bent down to place his current horn in its respective case - hesitating visibly for a brief moment, before scooping up the meager credits inside and carefully placing the horn in their place, closing and locking in a process that seemed well-rehearsed. He turned to walk over to his other horn. Deftly, Evaa began to reach nonchalantly down for the case, preparing herself to vanish into the crowd -

\- before something slammed heavily into her left shoulder, nearly knocking her to the permacrete road, if not for a vice-like grip locking onto her forearm, twisting her away from whomever its owner was and back on her feet in a rather painful manner that paid no respect to the intended range of motion of the limb. The aggressor shoved her away from the busker's stake-out as another hand clamped around her right arm. Evaa made a weak stab at escape, but her left shoulder, arm now contorted painfully behind her back, spiked with pain, threatening to dislocate should she attempt any further getaways. Helpless, she submitted herself, hoping that if this was a mugging, they wouldn't have the guts to kill her when they realized she had nothing.

In short order she was escorted into the nearby alley and shoved roughly against the wall. The impact knocked the air out of her chest and she let out an involuntary "oof" as a womp rat that had been rummaging through the adjacent building's trash collector skittered away to hide a safe distance away behind a pile of liquor bottles, frightened by this intrusion upon its habitat. She almost slumped to the ground, but reminded herself that that wouldn't be a very advantageous position should an opening arrive to escape. She decided to adopt a cornered appearance nonetheless and make it appear she was at their mercy. If there was one thing she'd learned in her years of living in the Coruscant underworld, it was that playing helpless was one of the best tactics you could employ in a confrontation with other lowlife; they loved feeling in control, having another being entirely at their mercy. It was a psychological thirst for most of them, and serving it to them got them as drunk on power as a Sullustan on Corellian whiskey. Drunk - and stupid.

Putting on a frightened face, Evaa turned around.

Oh.

Flanked on either side by a couple of his buddies was Pino, muscled arms bared, malicious smile on his face, lekku folded rascal-style across his shoulders. Evaa's jaw clenched as a vortex of emotions swept across her internal landscape. Viscous hatred was the only one she was willing to acknowledge at the moment. The rest were either confusing or otherwise distracting or useless. Externally, she immediately dropped her pretense of skittishness and straightened herself defiantly, crossing her arms to mirror Pino's lekku. She looked straight into his blue eyes that matched remarkably to his blemishless baby blue skin. She knew what was going on right now, and unlike any other common scum trying to rob her of credits, she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of being in control of her; she'd rather be robbed any day.

"Well look at the fine creature I've run into skulking around the lower levels," Pino proclaimed smugly. "Hey there babe." The final word rang disproportionately to the rest of those in the sentence through the dark dirty alleyway, bouncing off the durasteel walls back and forth in a maddening cacophony - or maybe that was just Evaa. She almost flinched, but perseverantly maintained an unfettered mask. She didn't respond.

Pino stepped forward with a surly gait, maintaining uncomfortable eye contact with those blue eyes, before breaking to make a savoring sweep up and down her body. Evaa felt exposed and uncomfortably vulnerable in the gaze. "Looks like your day-to-day routine hasn't changed. Am I right to guess that you were about to steal that poor Bith's horn?" Evaa didn't answer, glaring. "Pretty scummy, wouldn't you say?" He smirked charmingly.

A string snapped that had been hanging on only by a thread before, one that had been plucked far too many times. She snorted, a red mist forming around the edge of her vision, but trying to keep composure. That snort was louder than she intended. A glob of phlegm had almost dislodged from her nose. "And what about you, Pino? Running errands for the Mynocks is any better? Last time I checked, they had no problem stealing." Evaa glanced down at the waists of the three men in front of her. Surely enough, they were all three armed with (albeit cheap and probably old knock-off brand) blasters, no doubt obtained from the lower city gangs they ran with, chief among them of course the Mynocks, who in turn had undoubtedly attained the armaments through all manner of illicit methods. In strict technicality, blasters were illegal without license throughout Coruscant and most Core worlds, but in the current times those laws might as well be nonexistent for all the enforcement the Republic enacted of them. Of course they had no licenses. Neither had Evaa, when she had owned one.

Pino scowled mockingly and crossed his arms. "No, that's not the same, darling. The Mynocks have something called honor, you must not have heard of it; they don't steal from just any poor sod on the street. They steal from the Nexus, or the Republic. People who deserve it."

Evaa rolled her eyes. Honor. What did that mean to a man like Pino or the other lowlife in the Mynocks? Or to anyone who lived below the surface? The underworld stripped you of dignity the moment you entered; the act was a reversion to the primitive state of survival by any means necessary. It was a state devoid of "honor", an area where the social contract had been shredded to ribbons and its previous signers were bound to nothing. They owed society nil - that was why it was falling apart at the seams.

Pino did not take kindly to the petulant expression and his false charm vanished to be replaced by subtly bared white teeth. "Besides. We spend the proceeds wisely. We... invest. We don't burn it on more death sticks like some loser junkie."

Evaa's nostrils flared and the red mist expanded into a scarlet film over her entire field of vision. It was bad enough that Pino had been the one to first introduce her to the drugs, almost two revolutions ago now, and been the one to nurture her addiction from a recreational activity to the beginnings of a full-blown dependency. It was also infuriating enough that he had used it to manipulate her into all manner of depravity, the depths of which still caused her to shudder in recollection on long sleepless nights of reflection. Now he was mocking her for it. As if, if not for his Twi'lek physiology, well known for its resistance to poisons, he wouldn't be in the same situation as her right now.

Evaa's fist hurled for only a split second before her wrist was caught by the leathery hand of Pino's Weequay buddy and she was slammed back into the wall behind her. The back of her head met with an audible, sickening smack, and stars flew before Evaa's eyes. She dazedly stumbled and almost slumped against the wall once again before the other thug grabbed her by the shirt and propped her up. The soles of her feet lifted off the ground and she struggled on the tips of her toes to maintain contact with the permacrete. She instinctually fought back with a grunt, shoving her knees up towards the Human's torso. They met hard muscle with little more than a muffled thud, but she desperately continued, cursing violently at Pino, the thugs, the cruelty of Coruscant for its untimely convergence of her with relics of her past, until the unmistakable cold metal of the barrel's end of a blaster pistol pressed itself against her now-bared belly. A chill spread from the point of contact throughout her body, freezing her to near-paralysis. She surrendered. Fear mounted inside her, replacing rage with naked dread. Drug-hazed memories flashed in her mind in a hellish deja vu. Animalistic panic rose in her chest, and it took all her willpower not to scream - not that any passerby would likely be willing to help. Her head throbbed; her vision was blurred. He was in full control now, like he had been before.

Unabashed, Pino continued. "Which brings me to something I've been meaning to have a little talk with you about. You were planning to pay me back for all the things you took from my apartment when you ran off, right? I mean, my sugar-baby wouldn't steal from me, would she?" His warm breath wafted across her face now, and Evaa's warped vision filled with a distinct baby blue, flashes of perfect white obtruding every now and again as the words tumbled down her neck. Evaa shuddered - a confused shudder, as something buried deep inside her insidiously fluttered in her stomach, mingling with the rest of its current contents in a sickening concoction that was many times as unbearable as before. A familiar scent of Rylothian root-spice filled her nose. He had always smelled good - one thing he prided himself on was his hygiene, it was the shred of decency that he held onto like others in the underworld clutched at their own little manifestations of dignity as if they were lifelines to the surface world...

"Who am I kidding? You wouldn't have a single decicredit on you. I'd bet you - well, I'd reckon it, anyway." A white crescent gleamed against the blue background like a young moon in a daylight sky. "Well, there's other forms of currency, you know..." A smooth hand slipped under her shirt. Eva tried to recoil, sucking in her stomach, but the hand continued travelling, sliding, up her torso, towards her racing and palpitating heart and on a trajectory to continue beyond. "You've used it to pay off loans from me before, remember? Well, I think it's time to collect on interest. You in on payday, boys?"

Blue flashed. Evaa slammed her eyes shut with a violent flinch - but the visual cue she'd taken for an impending strike had been accompanied by a sound like a speeder revving at a high gear. The cold metal against her belly suddenly vanished after a brief flash of heat - but not a shot, she was unharmed. Evaa gasped. After a confused second, this was followed by cries from the thugs around her, and bewildered blurs of movement. The hand gripping her shirt quickly released, and she plummeted to the ground unprepared and crumpled to the alley floor in a pathetic ragdoll. Disorienting commotion ensued around her. More revving speeder noises, like an army of swoop gang racers, more shouts. A blaster fired; Evaa, suddenly remembering herself with the startle of that ingrained and internalized noise of danger, threw herself in almost pure reflex front-first to the side and covered the back of her head with her hands. Several more engine-like emissions, followed by pained shouts and curses. Two more bolts released, then there was a slam of hard organic matter on metal infrastructure. A groan; then relative silence, laying bare a low, flat hum of energy for several seconds. Evaa laid still, heart still pounding, head racing. Her dazed and battered mind scrambled to come up with an explanation; the Nexus must have come to run down members of the Mynocks in a drive-by. This was not a particulary large improvement to the situation. The Nexus did not have a friendly disposition towards her, to put it mildly. She was... somewhat notorious in the realm of gang politics, despite her best efforts to extract herself from the muddle since she had left Pino. She almost got up and ran, but as she turned her eyes upwards, her vision was still blurred, she was still dizzy, and could probably barely walk, let alone run. She would have crawled, but that wouldn't have gotten her far enough to matter. The hum of energy was silenced by a _whoosh_ and rushed footsteps - in her direction. Evaa resigned herself to her fate - just as bad or worse - and rolled herself over to at least look her new torturer or executioner or captor or otherwise in the eye - though she wouldn't even be able to distinguish it in her current state.

A shadow loomed over her. It grew larger as the figure knelt before her, an amalgamation of earthy brown and cream and pinkish-tan shades, not disrupted throughout by telltale blurbs indicating the usual patches or mismatched protective or utility attire of a gang member. This Nexu had a keener sense of fashion than any she had encountered before, and apparently the money to sate it. As he knelt, the figure's head became silhouetted by the mocking semblace of a sun that was the flood of natural sunlight let down to this level by the massive sinkhole-esque ventilation shaft and ship portal hanging far above the massive man-made cavern that was this sector of the mid levels - known colloquially to underword denizens as one of the many "drains" on Coruscant; while they were intended to provide an escape upwards for gases and fumes and hot air from factories or otherwise below (and, secondarily, a means for ships to travel below the surface to drop off cargo or deliver passengers), it often seemed that their primary function was to flush the poor and undesirable down from the surface into the sewers that were the lower levels, as they were the front doors into the Underworld to most.

"Are you alright?" A youthful male voice emanated from above her. Gently.

The words didn't register in Evaa's brain for several seconds. She almost didn't hear the softly-uttered phrase beyond the extant buzzing in her head and the pounding in her ears. She feebly grasped them as they began to slip away from her, puzzledly studied them, and decided that she must have misheard. "What?" she queried, squinting, hoping maybe she could get a better look to see if he was joking.

"I said are you alright?" he persisted. The blurb of his hand wandered forward, seemingly intending to grasp her shoulder, but stopped hesitantly, and laid itself onto the ground next to her head almost gingerly.

Evaa squinted hard several more times, still too vexed and wary to respond. Slowly, her vision began to return. The figure before her started to materialize like a hologram transmission decrypting its data. The horns were the first to become readily apparent; small bony nubs protruding from a bald head, together forming a "V" shape with a vertex an inch above a naked but strong warrior's brow that was currently arranged into an expression of consternation. Two more stubby spikes extended barely a centimeter outwards from each of his temples. They framed a young pink-tan face, probably teenaged, and missing the ornate web of thin, meticulously patterned tatoos that were common to his species. It had a structure that could become fearsome in a few years' time, but at the moment seemed slightly naive and out of place in the same field of view as its current surroundings. The clothing she had noted earlier was a set of simple earthy-colored cloak and robes, indeed well-washed and respectable, and draped around a lank, lean build. His left forearm rested on his knee, and in his hand was grasped a steely metal cylinder, hollow at the tip.

Evaa's shellshocked brain thawed out and put the pieces together.

"Uh, yeah," she finally replied, backpedalling on her hands and feet and hurriedly sitting up, before a vignette of black licked at her vision and her head pulsed excruciatingly, and a dizziness forced her back to rest on her elbows.

"Whoa, hey, don't get up too fast," the Jedi quickly advised. As Evaa reluctantly closed her eyes in a gambit to give her fried senses a brief rest, she heard him rustle back next to her. She felt anxiety at his presence, a response conditioned into her from many years of dodging authorities. She knew her appearance betrayed her gratuitous drug use. It was not a secret that was easily kept even from visual contact; death stick usage had a distinct toll on one's body that was noticed easily by anyone with even a passing familiarity with junkies. It was not commonly a problem anywhere below surface or upper levels because use was so omnipresent and users so common that most had learned not to care, and the Bith had been easy to fool because he was a new resident. But when police were down here, on a drug or brothel bust or just bored and brave enough to make the venture, it was not a good idea to make your face visible to them, because identifying junkies and taking them into custody was a simple matter of glancing and gunning them down on stun setting - or sometimes not even with the decency to switch to a non-lethal position. Evaa wondered if a lightsaber had a "stun" setting. From the brief glance she'd gotten at the incapacitated thugs strewn about the alleyway around them, with still-glowing cauterized energy wounds on the arms, legs, and other extremities of the three, as well as a gaping orange gash dividing Pino's chest diagonally into two new sections, she guessed that the answer was no.

As she laid agitatedly, a pit in her stomach erupted into a sickening nausea. Her insides spasmed and she turned over and dry-retched in several intense bouts that felt as if she was about to puke her intestines onto the permacrete. There was nothing inside besides her guts to make its way out, so the ground remained dry save for a drop of cold sweat that was thrown from her nose with one of the body-shaking heaves to splatter next to a cluster of womp rat droppings. A few more dripped down to join it as she waited impatiently for the episode to subside. The Jedi watched the ordeal in silence, apparently patiently waiting for - what? For her to submit so he could take her in? For her to die so he could provide another cheap cadaver to the University of Sanbra? Why didn't he just run her through? Evaa stared at the ground miserably, deep breaths now wracking her torso in place of gastrointestinal distress. This whole day had been a disaster. She should have just overdosed the night before.

The Jedi said something softly. Evaa didn't hear over the ringing in her ears, and wasn't interested in conversation enough to beg him to repeat himself. A moment passed, in which she quietly studied the rat droppings before her, and then he cleared his throat and, with an edge of uncertainty, repeated himself slightly louder. "Should I call you an ambulance?" What? Did he want her to die in the hospital so her corpse could be more conveniently cleaned up? Did he think the doctors would give him a royalty if he brought in another patient they could suck dry with exorbidant fees? Did he really think she had any money to pay?

"No," Evaa replied flatly.

"Are you sure? Your head got knocked pretty -"

"No," Evaa reiterated, a bit louder this time, now almost annoyed that he was so insistent on prolonging her suffering. So he had witnessed the whole thing. How long had he waited watching the ordeal? Enough to savor some of it for his own twisted pleasure? Evaa wondered despondently if she would be a decent cadaver for University researchers to study the effects of death stick addiction on. She'd heard stories, urban legends, about students being assigned by professors to retrieve fresh junkie corpses from the alleys and squats of the Underworld - some about them quietly killing a helpless live one when they rang up dry in their search but knew the exam was worth half of their final grade. Did the Jedi Temple have a class like that? Was she just a corpse in the eyes of this kid, one that would let him pass Jedi School?

The Jedi didn't reply and continued to watch her silently, shifting to sit in a criss-crossed position. Evaa felt almost as uncomfortable under his gaze as she had under Pino's. She righted herself, slowly this time, and while there was a bout of dizziness and an unpleasant sensation of blood draining from her head, she was able to make it now without nearly passing out. Avoiding the Jedi's imploring eyes, she glanced again around the alleyway. The two thugs lay thoroughly incapacitated, the Weequay spread-eagle on the ground and the Human slumped against an alley wall perfectly aligned a few feet under a dent in the rusty durasteel, head drooping to the side, blood dripping from the back of his balded cranium to mix on his sleeveless shirt with drool dribbling from his wide-open and loudly breathing mouth. Their blasters each lay with barrels neatly severed near them. As she beheld the sight, she heard the Weequay moan in pain and he rolled over onto his side to reveal, slumped across from the Human, Pino, his cross-sectioned chest motionless and once-lively blue eyes open on a smooth blue face now permanently stuck in a ghastly expression of shock. Evaa felt a lurch inside her at the sight; not another gastric reflex, but something else. And not from the sight of a corpse. No, dead bodies were a... common occurence in Evaa's life. It was from the sight of Pino's corpse.

The Jedi must have caught her staring; he craned his head behind him to follow the trajectory of her gawk, before quickly looking away to place his gaze onto the ground. Evaa also abruptly ceased her inappropriate stare, realizing her face had begun to mirror the corpse's, and jerked her head away. Silence passed, and then the Jedi glanced back over at Evaa and slowly stood up and stepped around the sniveling Weequay to stand before the crumpled Twi'lek body. Evaa looked up. The Jedi knelt before Pino and reached forward with slender fingers to gently push closed his wide-open eyes. Evaa stared quizzically.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," the Jedi intoned in a low voice, still looking down at the corpse. "I shouldn't have killed him. I didn't have to." Evaa blinked. She didn't know what to make of the show of remorse. She had always heard of the Jedi, from malcontent passing jabs in conversation with other lower residents, as uncaring, isolated, and out-of-touch monks who would rather sit philosophizing in their Temple than help the sick and poor and needy below the surface level. They were little more and no better than a branch of the Republic's Judicial department whose only endeavors below their comfortable home were to occasionally arrest drug dealers and gang kingpins who were less of a threat than and only a symptom of the Republic's economic policies. In the century before, and for millennia beyond, they had been proud warriors and the leaders of the Republic, who led its resources into an endless and costly war with a "Sith threat" that never seemed to justify itself and its plunging of Coruscant and the Republic into a Dark Age that was still far from being entirely recovered from. Now, however, they were just cops, elite lackeys of the Republic, even worse than their place in the Galaxy before. It perhaps showed how far the Jedi had fallen from the legends of old that Evaa now felt disbelief at the concept that a Jedi would actually live up to their code. The Jedi had not shown squeamishness towards killing during the Wars, and they did not show grief for the starving masses now, and the cynicism of the lower residents only served to amplify the resentment they felt towards this attitude.

"My Master would kill me," he muttered - not a repositioning of the source of the regret from taking a life to the possibility of a scolding from a teacher, but a remorseful acknowledgement, like a child regretting that he had committed an act his beloved mother had told him, and he knew in his heart, was wrong. The words subtly cast the Jedi in a new light, almost comical if not for the grimness of the situation; he was a child, Evaa realized to herself as if for the first time, regarding his boyish, innocent face in stark contrast to the grotesquerie of the corpse's in front of him. There was also something else there, microexpressions that Evaa had learned to read and always been able to perceive with an unnatural precision betraying an extant fear, like that of someone caught in the floodlights of death for the first time, a sensation Evaa had known long ago but had long since been buried under the deluge of near-death experiences she had lived through in her time. He'd been afraid when he'd killed Pino.

Now the possibility of his being a cadaver collector or murderer seemed silly, and Evaa falteringly dropped the melodrama of the assumptions. Hell, he probably couldn't even tell she was a junkie. Maybe she'd get out of this.

At a loss as to what to say, she sat quietly as the Jedi stood back up, taking a deep breath as he glanced around at the other two thugs. They seemed to be coming to; the Human rolled his head to the opposite shoulder, string of spittle following, and the Weequay moaned once again, cradling a precisely placed slice of an energy wound on his shoulder.

"I guess I should call the police then," he observed.

"No, don't," Evaa implored quickly. Obviously, she didn't want to get entangled in the cumbersome proceedings that accompanied the investigation of a crime scene. The idea of revenge against the thugs in the form of a sentence in prison didn't even hold her attention for half a second; Pino was already dead, and his accomplices had the burden of medical bills to bear, a fate that was not a massive improvement over prison for a lower resident. Besides, calling police was never even something that graced lower residents' minds in the event of an altercation, for clear reasons. "Please," she added as an afterthought, almost stumbling over the word she hadn't said in a long time.

He raised a brow. "Are you -"

Evaa interjected before he could finish once again. "Yes." Exhaustion had begun to wash over her, and she was not in the mood to justify her answer. The Jedi took a long look at her, apparently incredulous at her disinterest in help, but relented reluctantly.

"Is there _anything_ you need?" he asked gently. "Do you need to call your family?" No family. "I can walk you home." No home. The Jedi waited for her to respond with an affirmative to something, to no avail. "Food?" he implored awkwardly in a final bid, a suggestion he didn't seem to think would illicit any more enthusiastic a response than the others. Evaa's stomah panged in ravenous hunger at the suggestion, outside of her volition, despite the fact that it had just recently attempted to purge itself of its nonexistent contents. She tried to remember the last time she'd eaten, and couldn't. The only substances she had consumed in the last few days were death sticks, the nutritional and caloric contents of which were, needless to say, emptier than air. It wasn't that she wanted to take him up on his offer; the fiber of her being still groaned to be out of the presence of authority, however young and clueless. She wrestled with her angry stomach, and failed, as it pinned her brain down and forced it to accept the Jedi's offer.

"...Okay," Evaa reluctantly answered, bowing to the needs of her body. At least free food was an offer that was wise to take up in her current financial state.

The Jedi betrayed his surprise and slight relief for a moment. "Alright, then. I, uh, walked past a place earlier."

Evaa slowly began to stand up. The Jedi quickly stepped over to provide help as Evaa's head pounded with a surge of liquid pain. Her whole body was sore; dizziness still dominated her world, and she was forced to accept his arm lest she fall back over. Then, after a moment of regaining her bearings, she shrugged off his arm, and, with a glance that relayed clearly but unintentionally his befuddlement over this strange damsel in distress he had found himself on a date with, the Jedi shuffled to the mouth of the alley, with a glance back to make sure she was following and hadn't fallen over. Evaa nodded, having followed a few meters behind him with some shaky steps, stepping gingerly over the Weequay thug and almost stumbling as he rolled onto his other side under her, and he pulled up the hood of his robe and walked into the thoroughfare. Evaa hesitated, glancing down at Pino's body next to her, his baby blue skin morphing into an even paler shade almost before her eyes.

"You coming?" the Jedi said softly from behind her, startling Evaa from her despondent reverie of days long past, days that were almost happy to her, that had been forever tarnished by the horrors that had come subsequently. Evaa turned and nodded as the Jedi studied her face again, that look of remorse clouding the young features, as Evaa tried behind a sabacc face to reconcile with her utterly confused self the existence of a man so horrible that she had once actually loved. Then, before peace had been made with herself, like always, they were off, leaving his corpse behind for his lackeys to clean up for them.

They integrated into the bustle and walked, the Jedi keeping a slow pace that earned him irked glances and shoves from impatient tailgaters and glancing behind him often to check on her trailing a few meters behind, and as they did, Evaa heard a familiar voice that had been stored in her short-term memory.

"There you are! Are you alright?" The Bith had waded through the crowd to meet her as they had trailed past his busking spot. Evaa gave a weak smile at him to placate his concern, underneath the usual facade annoyed at the delay.

"Yes, fine," she replied curtly but sickly-sweet polite.

"Thank the Force. And of course, thank you, sir, for going after her; whatever you did, I'm glad this woman is alright. Those men did not seem friendly." He was speaking to the Jedi, who had turned around to regard the Bith.

"Thanks for raising the alarm," the Jedi responded from under his hood, his words coming from a different place now, one of practiced authority and respectfulness. "Because of you she's safe now." He reached out to deposit a few credit chips into the Bith's hand.

"Oh, no, sir," the Bith intoned, pushing the currency away. "I'm just happy to do my civic duty. I must return to my playing; I see you two are off as well. Here's my business card, miss," he offered forward a datachip embedded with his likeness in a smooth pose with his kloo horn, wearing the same outfit he was in now, accompanied by zanily colored Aurebesh lettering. "I hope to see you again. Take care, and keep blowing." He winked, an awkward and strange expression on his Bith face that clearly wasn't endemic to his species and he must have learned and replicated from interaction with humanoids, then turned away to return to his post. Evaa shoved the datachip into her pocket, watching him pick his way through the crowd, getting jostled by impatient pedestrians far larger than him. His colossal cranium vanished.

"You play the Kloo horn?" the Jedi asked, in a tentative jab at small talk.

"No," Evaa replied, eyes still fixed absentmindedly at the spot where the Bith had disappeared into the crowd. "I don't play any instrument."

After her refusal to elaborate, the Jedi blankly turned, and they continued their trek towards nourishment.


	3. Chapter 3

The diner was a small place, wedged in between a filthy speeder repair stop that Evaa had the strong suspicion was a front for a brothel judging by the clothing and demeanor of the patrons entering and exiting, and a long-shuttered general store that had clearly been broken into one too many times and had almost definitely become a squat. The eatery was crowded and claustrophobic, filled with a populace as colorful and loud as the streets outside, and they'd been ushered by an exhausted-looking waitress past the bar to a little table near the back and given their menus on datatablets rusty and plastered by crudded residue of spilled food and drink. Evaa's had a large dead spot near the center of the screen, and she hadn't really been able to make out the descriptions of the items (the asinine layout, amateur to the point of incomprehensibility, not helping in the least), so she'd ordered at random, hoping it wasn't something raw offered for customers of a carnivorous species, or insects intended for Kubaz, or something of the like. The waitress hadn't given her a funny look, so maybe she'd picked something fit for Human consumption, though the middle-aged woman may have just missed it in her overly apparent state of fatigue. The Jedi, sitting across from Evaa in the uncomfortable metal booth, asked for a vegetable soup of some sort, and the waitress tiredly repossessed the menus and trudged off to continue her overwork. Evaa hadn't seen another waiter on the way in.

She sat now waiting for her food with eyes intent on a dent in the table in front of her, finger tracing back and forth through it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the Jedi fidgeting with something in his lap, glancing intermittently up at her in in a look laced with both curiosity and some sort of trepidation. She let the air between them stew and mix with the multilingual babble of the other patrons around them for several minutes before the Jedi rudely contaminated the brew.

"I'm sorry that happened to you," he ventured, ceasing his fidgeting for a moment to affix a stuttering hazel gaze onto her. Evaa had never understood those phrases; apologies for things that weren't their fault. Why make amends for an occurrence that you had no responsibility for? Normally they felt insincere, but from the young Zabrak this one had almost the opposite effect - he seemed to possess a need to soothe personal animosity between them where none existed. Impersonal animosity did, sure; he was a Jedi, she was a junkie street rat, they were a pairing made on Malachor, although again such division was through no fault of his, it was an intrinsic structure of the social order that they had found themselves woven into. But no blame from Evaa for the situation of the last half-hour rested on the shoulders of the Jedi.

In fact, Evaa acknowledged to herself in a brief flash of propriety, if anything she owed him thanks.

The sentiment was shoved away as quickly as it had appeared with a cynical justification: she owed no Jedi, or any politician or Republic official, the invasive fungal growth on her boot. They were oppressors, and any sort of help they so kindly chose to bestow upon the lowly peasants below them only served as reparations that were an infinitesimal charge in the power pack towards annulling their massive accrued debt towards their subjects. This Jedi was no less complicit in the apathy of his Order towards the suffering of the Republic at large than any other. At least, that was as she told herself, choosing to ignore how this premise conflicted with her previously acknowledged disinterest in pursuing a personal issue with the one before her.

"It's fine," Evaa responded tiredly. She was still too dazed to allow her mind to run circles sorting out who owed who what. She rested her head on a hand propped up by the elbow on the table, still running her other fingers through the curiously shaped dent that she couldn't seem to take her eyes off of.

"No, really. I'm sure it must be traumatic..."

Evaa almost snorted, but thankfully contained herself. If he thought that was something that would register in the strict sense as "traumatic" to her calloused mind, he was more naive than she thought. Unwanted physical contact? She'd endured far too much of it, and Pino was a repeat offender. And it was not like the other women of the Underworld lived lives blissfully free of such acts in any capacity anyway. It had certainly been an unpleasant experience, but when her night terrors came next, there were many worse events burned into her mind that would manifest themselves in nightmarish terror first; if, that is, and it was looking to be a likely scenario at this point, she failed to renew her usual means of drowning out her dreams by the next time she passed out.

"...and if you need to talk about it or something, I could take you to someone..."

Evaa shook her head. He was still trying to get her help, whatever that meant. She waved away this offer as disinterestedly as the others with a motion of her fingers.

"...I can imagine it's hard to talk about..."

"No," Evaa interjected, slightly too loudly. A Shistavanen at the bar across the way from their table turned on a swiveling chair to glance at her. She gave him a look edged with ice, and he shrugged a furred shoulder innocently and turned back to his red and bloody meal. Evaa sighed under her breath, resuming her perusal of her durasteel muse as the Jedi regarded her with his mouth momentarily closed. "I'm fine."

"Really," she added quickly.

He sat still with his hands in his lap, eyes examining her with the usual bafflement. He started up again carefully, "You know, you can tell me if you need to. I'm a Jedi..."

"Oh, you're a Jedi?" Evaa fired back with scathing sarcasm, in an abruptness that startled even herself, rolling her eyes into the top of her skull and then fixing them on him in a sickly smooth motion. "In that case, I'll tell you everything. What do you want to know first, where on the doll he touched me?"

The Jedi clearly had realized his mistake and regretted the words as soon as they had exited his mouth. He detached himself from her searing gaze to return his eyes to his lap. Evaa felt a twinge of guilt inside of her despite her best efforts to repress any feelings of sympathy in the wake of the righteous indignation that had so suddenly seized her; she hadn't intended to blow up like that, but she had always been prone to sudden fits of anger, and it felt as if something was impeding her self-control at the moment. She shook her head and squinted; she felt strange, or even more-so than her usual drug-addled perception.

The Jedi was fidgeting with the object in his lap again. His lightsaber, probably, she realized. She found it odd, now that her mind rested on it, that a weapon of such incredible lethality, not to mention such a symbol of status, was allowed in the hands of... a child. She knew that the Jedi took their initiates in from very young, but she'd never considered long the implications of such a practice until a teenaged one appeared in front of her. The Jedi held such power and influence, and here, in this little corner of Coruscant, in a little diner between a brothel and a squat, this young Zabrak, not a day over seventeen she reckoned (or likely less, since she knew the species matured a bit earlier than Humans), represented all that authority in absentia of a more venerable or experienced member of the Order. She wondered what that would be like, to have to be an example, to need to live up to legendary expectations everywhere you went, as a child. Evaa had never had much of a childhood to speak of, but she could imagine the difficulties of such a life.

Of course, she reminded herself, that life came with far more benefits than disadvantages, all of which she would kill for, and the Jedi had done nothing to earn them besides being selected from birth.

Evaa sat with forearms flat on the table, eyes flitting back and forth from the dent to the now avoidant Jedi. The food was taking awhile, and she guessed it would be still longer until they could each fix their attention on their meals; she glanced around the diner, seeing no signs of the waitress, and making accidental eye contact with a couple of other patrons who were peevedly scoping their surroundings for their nonexistent service as well. She turned back to the the Jedi.

"What are you doing down here, anyway?" she found herself inquiring, voice a neutral tone, as the rogue section of her brain that had taken upon itself to commandeer her mouth and pose the question couldn't seem to decide whether to adopt a persecutive stance or a sympathetic one. The Jedi looked up from his lightsaber with slight disbelief, then reached up to place the hilt on the table before hesitatingly deciding against it and glancing around the room; he slowly placed it back in his lap as he met her gaze, apparently trying to ascertain her facial expression to ascribe an intent to the question. Finding her face a pazaak mask, he cautiously put an answer forward.

"I was... walking," he disclosed avoidantly. Evaa preemptively fastened her mouth to prevent the cluster of rebellious brain matter from causing her to blurt out "no duh" or something of the like, but the Jedi continued before it became an issue.

"I like walking," he resumed, rushing the empty words in a manner that suggested that he'd caught on to the impression of trying to evade the question that he'd given before. "I ended up on this level."

Evaa raised an eyebrow. "This isn't exactly a scenic trail," she remarked, unable to believe that anyone of his affluence would come down here of their own volition, unless the Jedi really did enjoy the destitution that took place under their watch.

"Well... I was looking for something to do."

Evaa exhaled swiftly from her nose in a ghost of a chuckle; well he'd certainly found that. Was the Underworld a playground to him? A place that young Jedi could duck into for excitement, only to return to the Temple at the end of the day to a cup of hot Kashyyyk cocoa from their masters? "How'd that work out?" Her voice, always low for a woman, was in its full and usual surly tone now. This was the longest conversation she'd had in more than a week.

He'd suddenly noticed the utensil dispensary and was now toying with it with disproportionate fascination in an excuse to elude her eyes. "Well, not great. Until that Bith started calling for help, I guess."

Evaa had no desire to tread the ground of the encounter that had been their meeting again, so she dropped the subject. She could tell the Jedi wasn't being entirely truthful but the conversation had walked itself into a Sarlacc pit and died. She adjusted her jacket, glancing down at her white undershirt, or more accurately, it once had been white before stains had come to cover nearly every square inch of it. She had worn the same article for weeks now, after she'd nicked it from a used clothing stand at the bazaar; she wondered briefly what she must look like - and smell like, considering she also couldn't recall the last time she'd refreshed herself - to the boy before her. The insight didn't make her self-conscious, no, that was not an emotion that had been in her repertoire for a very long time, but it further added to the surrealism of the current situation.

"I -" the Jedi began softly, startling Evaa out of her self-examination, before the impending sentence was halted. Evaa looked up quizzically at him, noticing that he'd had his eyes fixed on her clothing as well, but he waved the words away sheepishly, looking back down at his lightsaber.

"What?" Evaa asked, slightly annoyed at the loose end he'd left hanging despite her prior insistence to herself that she'd be satisfied with silence for the remainder of the outing.

"Never mind." The "V" pattern of his little horns pointed down like an arrow at his current occupation.

"What?" Evaa repeated insistently, almost accusatorily. He hadn't been this hesitant to speak before.

"Nothing. Just..." He looked up at the ceiling. "I've never been this low before. It's... well..." He slowly met her eyes, before quickly looking back down into his lap, seemingly unable to stutter out a completion of his thought.

Evaa could interpret the lack of words as well as any essay thanks to the context clues. The tiny, uncomfortable glimmering of contrition made itself known in her psyche again, gnawing with little teeth like a womp rat at a discarded gizka leg. He hadn't been aware of, or at least not entirely familiar with, the state of squalor of the lower levels. The small revelation explained little things that Evaa had cynically swept off from the moment she had made her impromptu acquaintance with him; the way he'd slowed his step on their way to the diner as they passed a sprawling hobo camp situated under an overpass that resembled a third-Galaxy city; the expression of incredulous disgust she'd caught him making at the discarded corpse of a seared womp rat at the mouth of an alleyway, distinctly humanoid teeth marks bored into it; the way he had hesitated at the front of the restaurant as he noticed two women fighting viciously down the street apparently over a decrepit service droid; all scenes that Evaa had become accustomed to and brushed off without a moment's thought, as she always did. The images of poverty were new to him. He was sheltered, Evaa realized; of course he didn't live in the same world as Evaa, he'd been indoctrinated into and raised in comfort, and he was too young and inexperienced to truly know otherwise. Even if he saw on the HoloNet every once in awhile stories about the economic issues the Republic faced, would that have really made him aware of the extent of the suffering?

Maybe he hadn't been turning a blind eye as the rest of the Jedi did; maybe he was simply oblivious.

But could she blame him for his ignorance?

Evaa reflected over the question, turning over the dilemma in her mind like he turned over the weapon in his lap.

"It's shit." Evaa returned to his hanging statement and completed it for him, tone softened slightly despite the harshness of the phrase she'd chosen to use. The Jedi looked up, meeting her eyes, and, now reassured of the level of propriety that the phrase held in his present company, shrugged an affirmative.

"Yeah," he responded. "It's shit."

They sat for more than a half hour in silence slightly more comfortable now, as if they had made some sort of momentary peace with each other over the words. Evaa watched passively over the period as other patrons angrily made their leave of the slow-serviced diner, often hurling verbal abuse over the bar counter into the kitchen as they left, despite no employees being visible. Eventually several bouts of shouting became audible from the backroom, and the lone waitress came barreling out of the swinging doors, obviously distraught, tears streaming down her face or pooling in the dark bags under her eyes before being frustradedly swept away as she strode despairingly across the diner, shooting glances at customers looking on that would have been indignant if not for the fact that they were fired between pitiable sniffles and poorly-suppressed sobs. She slammed the front door behind her, and the brief lull in the surrounding conversation turned to grumblings as the rest of the waiting customers realized their meals would now be even longer coming, if they even arrived at all. A large swathe of them got up to leave, or, it seemed for a moment, storm the kitchen and demand their meals in a rag-tag militia, before a large, full-bellied Trandoshan burst out of the kitchen doors in a dirty smock heavily stained with foodstuffs of all sorts and a tray balanced on his scaly clawed hand with a practiced dexterity that belied his hulking appearance. He roared out something in heavily-accented, deep-voiced Basic to the diner about having to deal with slow service or get out, and they'd need to make that decision knowing full well this was the only diner left open within several kilometers. The grumblings continued, but the majority of the defectors resumed their seats reluctantly. The oversized lizard, muttering disgruntledly under his breath, stalked over to Evaa and the Jedi's table where they sat observing the goings on with a starkly opposing duality of dispositions - unimpressed apathy from Evaa, and flummoxed disbelief from the Jedi - and set down the tray with surprising gentleness. "'Ere ya go," he growled gruffly. "And sssay, if'n ya know anybody lookin' for a job, I gotsss an opening now." He stalked back into the kitchen to get back to his now-doubled workload.

The diner returned to its previous decibel level - or actually quieter now, it seemed - as the two turned their attention to their food. The mystery meal that Evaa had ordered had turned out to be some sort of squid dish, rubbery grey-fleshed tentacles (devoid of suckers, interestingly enough) strewn haphazardly across her plate with little else to complement them. Perhaps in a past life the dish would not have seemed terribly appetizing to her, but her aching stomach coerced her into grabbing a utensil and diving for better or worse into the aquatic dish. The Jedi looked on perturbedly as she imbibed an entire limb with a noisy slurp. She saw him glance down at his soup - the broth glinted with an inexplicable neon yellow while the vegetables floated dejectedly within it, either colorless or too colorful. He did not seem enticed, and set his spoon down, apparently content to watch Evaa eat.

"You live around this level?" he asked, choosing to feed his appetite for conversation rather than for food, much to Evaa's quiet chagrin. The question had been posed with a faint accent on the second word, probably inflected more subconsciously than otherwise.

She took her time finishing another of the fleshy noodles before bothering herself to answer; the dish was maybe not as bad as she would have imagined, at least to her, although she bet the Jedi would be less than impressed, though of course he had never been reduced to living off of rotten food thrown down a garbage chute. "No," she answered curtly, another slippery appendage held up to her mouth before she added, "Lower." She threw the grub in, letting them both chew on the morsels they'd been supplied.

"Lower...?" he trailed absently, in a manner that implied that he didn't want to think about what lied farther down than this, if his mind could even imagine it; the response Evaa had expected and hoped to illicit, and she received it with graceless inner humor. Obviously, if the Jedi meant to ask where her home was, she had just as many property rights in the Lower City as in the noble districts, but she certainly spent the majority of her time below, dodging gangs and selling off loot and sleeping wherever she could, so it wasn't a lie.

"Yeah," she reiterated, and continued dryly, "down where the ghouls live."

The Jedi calked his head rather like a puzzled gizka, seemingly trying to determine whether she was serious; a fruitless venture, as her faced remained as stony as every prior instance that he had attempted to decipher it. To anyone who hadn't had a giant plasmalight shone into their adolescent face for the last couple hours or so, the suggestion of the existence of the mythic beasts, more childhood bedtime legend than anything else, on Coruscant would have been shrugged off with a laugh, but apparently after everything the young Zabrak had witnessed recently the idea of them lurking on the Lower Levels, spreading their plague across a helpless populace as they feasted on sentient flesh, didn't seem entirely out of the realm of plausibility.

"You're joking," he nevertheless concluded, though clearly still uncertain enough to vocalize the deduction.

Evaa didn't answer, but her lips morphed ever so slightly into an arid smile around a mouthful of squid.

The sound of a blaster firing rent the air. Evaa's utensil fell from her hand to clatter onto her plate, half-eaten tentacle still attached, and following her first instinct she dove under the table like a frightened animal, well before the disruption had fully registered to the rest of the diner. Then, the patrons erupted into many-tongued shouts and cries, muffled by her improvised cover, before two more successive discharges made themselves heard through the babble and, along with a pair of assertive yells, quieted the eatery. Evaa, from her spot crouching down, perceived the bottom half of the Jedi tense, feet balanced on their balls apprehensively but uncertainly, like a womp rat unsure whether to flee or hold its ground against possible danger.

"Stay where you are and nobody gets hurt!" a harsh tenor voice hollered in a bastardized Corellian accent. Relative silence replied for a moment, not even a whimper to be heard. Evaa took the opportunity to swallow the squid she'd only just realized was still half-chewed in her mouth.

A different voice that Evaa located as from a booth near to theirs broke the quiet after a few seconds. "You trynna stick this place up, mate? Ya ain't gonna find nothin', can't even pay their waitresses."

There was a second before a reply. "Ey, shut up" - another voice, similarly butchered Basic, but more of a guttural baritone.

"Yeah, this ain't your business," the tenor reinforced. "Besides, we ain't lookin' for no money."

"What for then? Food? The bloody lizard can't even cook well."

Another blaster shot; this time its impact on the ceiling was audible.

"Alright, alright, hotshot, you ain't the only one with a blaster in here. Go ahead, I don't care. I've been waiting for an hour anyway."

After a reinforcing growl from one of the robbers, the patron ceased his interruptions. Footsteps struck out towards her general direction, and Evaa felt a jump in her chest where before she had been resolved to simply ride out the more-or-less routine burglary. If they weren't after money, were they after her? They must be Mynocks, on a quest for revenge after they found their fellow gang member Pino dead in an alley being gnawed on by rats, his beat-up thugs having ratted to them that Evaa had been the cause of his death; or, that is, the most direct one that they could hope to exact justice on. Her pulse quickened; she'd been foolish and stupid, she should have made herself hidden as soon as she'd left Pino's body. They knew where she was, they were going to flip over the table and Evaa would be naked before them. She noticed the Jedi mirror her sudden tensing - his left hand clutched his lightsaber now, his knuckles white, thumb hovering with microscopic tremors belying hard and fast pulsing blood being pumped into the extremity over what Evaa assumed to be the activation switch...

Evaa heard the kitchen doors near them swing open, slamming into the walls with the force behind them. The low rasp of the reptilian chef's grumbles became audible, then its cadence rose into a shout - "What the hell is going on in 'ere? No blassster play in my diner!" His heavy footsteps came plodding forward, before something - the unexpected silence of the diner, the frightened face of customers, or maybe just a robber pointing a blaster right at his snout - tipped him off to the abnormality in his establishment, and his three-taloned feet, unshod save for the lizard's ruddy brown scales, came to a stop where Evaa could see them next to her and the Jedi's table.

"Ah, I sssee. Ya damn ssscoundrels tryin' to claim territory in thisss dissstrict now? You're braver than I thought." The piercing treble of the hisses from his slender forked tongue clashed with the deep-pitched productions of his immense voice-box.

"We ain't no Nexus or Mynocks, lizard-brain," the tenor replied with a sneer in his grating pitch. "You can keep your lousy diner. Where's that droid?"

With the utterance of that demand, Evaa saw the trio of claws on each of the lizard's feet clamp down on the floor as if trying to gain purchase into the durasteel. A low, menacing growl emanated from the Trandoshan's barrel chest, so full of rumbling bass frequencies that even through the metal table Evaa could hear the unsettling noise clearly. "You aren't taking the droid." Each word was enunciated with a fatalistic emphasis on it. Out of the corner of her eye, Evaa saw the Jedi's poised finger twitch.

"Nah, we are," objected the tenor matter-of-factly. "Over your dead body, if we gotta."

At that point, several things happened in such quick succession that Evaa was unsure of the true order that they occurred in. The Jedi swiveled and stood in a blindingly fast motion; his lightsaber roared to life in a similarly blinding flood of cyan light; and a blaster bolt tore forth, meeting a target with the unmistakable, sickening _thwup_ of a projectile of pure energy striking flesh. A wordless rumble was heard, and Evaa watched the black talons leave the floor as their attached set of feet pivoted backwards on their heels. The Jedi's traditionally attired feet, positioned close to the lizard's pair, jerked, then followed the Trandoshan's down, as the blue light vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The two hit the floor together with a ground-shaking slam that rocked the table above Evaa. Exclamations poured forth from the robbers' mouths.

"The hell? It's a kriffin' Jedi!"

"Well don't just stand there, he's pinned, shoot'im!"

Something kicked in inside of Evaa, something akin to... empathetic fear? Before the tough folds of her drug-addled, calloused brain could choke out the sentiment behind it under its many layers of unashamedly top-priority concern its own preservation, Evaa reached up and, with a strength and urgency she hadn't known she could have summoned before, shoved the durasteel table above her forward. It clanged to the floor loudly to provide makeshift cover for the Jedi and his cold-blooded friend, even as a volley of shots flew forward. Evaa followed her cover and dived behind the table as she saw and heard the table shudder and groan next to her under the impact of several bolts - blocking their trajectory directly into her body by a layer of durasteel only a few centimeters thick. Other customers screamed around her, scrambling to their own cover away from the hail of blaster fire; the Shistavanen who had checked Evaa earlier dived over the bar counter with a primal squeal, knocking his drink to the floor.

The brutes' curses resumed with a new bout of confusion as Evaa jerked her neck to get a look at the boy she had intervened to save. There he laid, shoulder and arm pinned under the likely literally dead weight of the chef, panicked look on his face mixing with the contorted showings of effort as he tried valiantly to free his limb from under the leaden mass. Otherwise, he seemed unharmed - though a black pock-mark smoked newly ingrained into the floor next to his prickled head. Large; a pistol wouldn't leave a mark of that size, these criminals were toting heavier ordinance. Her eyes flitted back to the Jedi, and their gazes locked for a split second; he shot a grateful expression to her, tainted with an urgent plea for help. Evaa lunged over and placed her hands on the side of the Trandoshan's protruding pot belly and heaved, and, with the Jedi's one-armed assistance, the mound of flesh gave enough for him to pry his arm out. His lightsaber hilt glinted in the artificial light as it was retrieved from the dark, and then the blaze of its activation shone again through the diner. The blue cast across the chef's body, illuminating an unnatural misshapen bulge on the side of the Trandoshan's dull, stained trousers. Evaa reached into the associated pocket and ripped free a small holdout blaster - safety off, fully charged.

Evaa whipped around, newly retrieved weapon held out, to find that the Jedi had scrambled to sit apprehensively with his back against the table, saber held in front of him. The thugs had advanced towards the overturned furnishing in hopes of routing them from cover. One, that Evaa could now see was a Houk, levied the barrel of a blaster rifle into Evaa's chest as he reached the stake-out, ignorant of the Jedi's current position directly under him as the Zabrak's head craned to see the barrel protruding above him. The Jedi's blade lashed out from below in an arc that lingered supernaturally in the air as if burned into her retina, and the front end of the gun clattered onto the floor while the Houk blinked his disproportionately tiny eyes incredulously in response. Evaa took the opening to fire, and with a yellow flash two new glowing little wounds appeared in the Houk's large torso in a lopsided semblance of binary suns. Not enough to kill the brawny thick-skinned being, but he dropped the remaining half of his rifle and clutched the injuries with a howl that identified him as the baritone of the duo as he staggered back.

"Blast it Kudge, you oaf!" the tenor lamented angrily from just out of view. Evaa, trying to keep herself out of their line of sight, shuffled herself next to the Jedi to take up a position against the table as well. In tandem, they stretched to peek their eyes just above the lip of their cover, but only a brief glance was extracted of the scene - the Houk leaned on a table clutching his torso while those seated at it shied away with fear, a gaunt hollow-cheeked Human with a short greasy crop of dull-brown hair that Evaa could assume was the tenor poised frustratedly behind him with eyes shooting lasers as tangible as his blaster munitions at the back of the Houk's bald head, surrounding patrons in disarray, some making breaks to escape out the doors - before the Human's hip-braced blaster rifle's muzzle flashed and fired off a quick potshot that grazed the edge of the table between Evaa and the Jedi's heads so close that Evaa felt the searing heat on the tip of her nose for a millisecond. They jerked back into safety as the shot collided with the kitchen doors down the way from them; Evaa saw out of the corner of her eye one of the fairly dense metal sheets swing inwards with the impact.

They were still pinned.

"Let's get into the back," Evaa hissed, motioning with the blaster to the doors. If they could make it, they'd have a clear shot out of the back door to escape this Force-saken diner.

"What?" the Jedi turned his head from intent listening to regard her, having missed the suggestion under the din of shouting and his preoccupation with their current predicament. His hazel-gold warriors' eyes were alive with the glint of his blade, not shining with blood-lust or war-glory, but frenzied fear. Evaa annoyedly repeated her words, thoroughly peeved that the boy needed her to take the precious time to restate herself in the heat of a life-or-death situation, but the young Jedi's brow conveyed anxiety, and he replied, "What about the chef?"

Evaa ground her teeth frustratedly, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at his naive concern for others. "He's dead! Let's just go!" she barked.

Intense disquiet gnawed at the Zabrak's face and he bit his lip with indecisiveness, staring at the motionless body of the Trandoshan; panicked impatience rose in Evaa as precious seconds ticked by, and she considered the (for some reason unpleasant to her) option of leaving him behind. Then, the table shifted next to them, and Evaa barely jerked herself aside in time as they were laid bare for the Human's picking by the Houk hoisting the table above his head from the side with a mighty heft. Bolts flew by, and a few tore holes through the Jedi's cloak as he took evasive action, others peppering the floor in a trail across the durasteel as they followed the Jedi in a heat-seeking hail. Evaa lunged herself away, but the seemingly mediocre sharpshooter's primary target appeared to be the Jedi. She brought her hand up and around, blaster in it, to get a shot off at him and knock askew his bead on the Jedi, but as she spun, she saw the Houk winding up with grunting strain to lob the heavy table onto her, his beady black eyes boring into her with a snarl. A warbling, wordless bleat of fear escaped Evaa's chest as she scrambled back on her hands and knees and out of the shadow of the hulking sentient to avoid being crushed, but the Houk's aim was determined, and with a hearty heave, the heavy metal durasteel was airborne with the force of Coruscant's gravity and the Houk's muscle fully behind it. Evaa shut her eyes tightly, ready for an impact that would surely crush most of the bones in her body if it didn't kill her before she could experience the pain, and in a last-ditch effort for her own providence, rolled herself aside violently. She ended up on her stomach, and an ear-splitting clang piercing her right eardrum told her the furnishing had struck - but she was alive and intact. She gasped, unable to believe her luck, and, suddenly remembering herself and her situation, she rolled over to continue the momentum of her life-saving maneuver. The table lay upside-down gut-wrenchingly close next to her, and the Houk was still reeling off-balance from his over-exertion - Evaa shot her arm up and fired a couple bolts towards him once more. One struck true on his kneecap, and with a yelp, his balance gave out and he crashed to the floor.

The Jedi had somehow avoided running afoul of the steady stream of shots pouring from the Human in the moment that the previous scene had ensued, and the robber's tenor now shrieked with frustration as the Jedi dodged yet another round, his exasperation augmented by the taking out of commission of his partner-in-crime. Evaa raised her gun to fire, and his sunken eyes flitted to her, his blaster shortly following. They pulled their triggers on each other at exactly the same time - but there was no flash of light and heat, no ringing discharge of a bolt from either of their weapons, and instead, sounding through the empty space, was a pair of clicks. Their curses came just as simultaneously, but the robber threw his rifle to the ground and drew a readily-holstered heavy blaster pistol from his waist, even as Evaa rushed to her feet, grabbed the uncertainly poised Jedi by the forearm, and, as the Zabrak reluctantly gave to her rough yank, they barged through the kitchen doors as their retreat was pursued by a renewed spit-fire of blaster bolts.

Evaa kicked the door closed behind her as a few blasts pattered into the other side of it. She more or less threw the Jedi ahead of her, and he stumbled into the room as she tore down a rack of pots and pans to barricade the door behind them, while infuriated shouting came from the other side of the portal. Evaa took no longer to interpret the stream of expletives and obscenities and darted past the Jedi and around the cooking island (a pot had been left unattended on one of the black stove tops, boiling over and whistling loudly) to locate a back exit.

"Are they following us?" the Jedi implored to himself cluelessly, his voice teetering on the edge of panic but trying to maintain discipline.

"Of course they are," Evaa answered for him, glancing behind a freezer to find it covering a rusted exit door. "So let's get the hell out of here." She shoved at it, but it obstinately refused to budge as if it was in league with the enemy. She cursed. "Give me a hand with this?"

To her relief, the Jedi obliged, but not without a troubled expression on his face that Evaa could all too easily assume the meaning of. She turned to look at him as they took up positions around the immovable object.

"He's already dead, there's nothing you can do," she told him.

It was as likely truth as it was a lie. Evaa hadn't had time to take a pulse or monitor breathing. But making the Jedi believe the false assurance was better than having him verify it himself, or else they'd be as dead meat as the contents of the freezer.

The Jedi met her gaze; those hazel eyes were cloudy dull with guilt and worry, and they lingered on her for only a short time before they were torn away, the boy pursing his lips. Evaa disregarded a little inkling of guilt that fought like a starved Reek to make its way out of the back of her skull and instead focused herself on the task at hand.

They pushed at the freezer with their best musterings, and with the grating squeals of metal sliding across metal, it began to give - but not enough. The panel to the door behind was only partially revealed even as a boom struck out from the kitchen's entrance that shook the pots and pans and utensils around the kitchen, followed by several more bangs - the pot rack was only barely holding the doors closed.

"Kriff, kriff, kriff..." A stream-of-consciousness river of curses flowed from Evaa's mouth, and she was too panicked to think of anything more creative than the worst word she knew on a loop. But that seemed the most appropriate anyway.

The freezer had become stuck on something and no longer gave to their effort. Evaa's muscles were about to burst with the combination of the strain she was forcing on them and the pulsing torrents of blood being pumped into them. The bangs came in intervals steadily shrinking in length. "Kriff, kriff, kriff -"

"It's not going to move any more," the Jedi warned, his voice wavering upwards progressively over the course of the statement, unable now to keep his fear from bleeding profusely into his voice. The pot on the stove screamed, warbling and careening wildly between soprano pitches.

"It will, or we're dead," Evaa gasped, thrusting relentlessly, in vain.

The entrance exploded open with the roar of an infuriated Houk and the blasts of a rifle frizzling on the edge of overheating. Evaa yanked her head around only to be nearly blinded by the flash of a muzzle leveraged perfectly perpendicular with her face. She had not even time to react, to cry out, to close her eyes for her final repose (if they even remained after impact), or let alone to dodge out of the way - but there was a familiar flash of blue lashing out from next to her, drowning out in a wash of cyan the burning scarlet of the capsule of energy. With the crash of pure energy meeting pure energy, the blaster bolt's trajectory was altered, and it collided into a cabinet door that crumpled inward and was ripped from the hinges with the impact. Evaa dove behind the cooking island, grimacing and squinting in an attempt to clear the large dot newly burned into her eyesight.

Out of the edge of her view that was not obscured, she perceived the Jedi staring at his his still-outstretched lightsaber, as if in disbelief that he had actually managed to deflect the bolt. Then, the blasts renewed. The Jedi jerked aside to dodge a shot and it tore through the fabric of his robe as it lingered in the air where its wearer had just been posed. The Houk was barreling with a pronounced limp but fueled by humiliated fury across the kitchen, tearing racks down and sweeping cluttered dishes off countertops on his way to trample the Jedi, who was still dodging shots from the Human, who had reloaded his rifle. The distance closed, and the Jedi was clearly being overwhelmed by the combination of assaults. Evaa, with reckless abandon only unleashed in the blistering heat of a near-death situation, threw the length of her body from her cover onto the ground in front of the Houk as he rounded the island, and the brute's boot snagged under her ribs. He fell, again, with a roar, face-first. Evaa wasted no time, and scrambled onto his muscled back just as he slammed onto the floor. She knew her slight, malnourished frame would not hold the hulking sentient down, and quickly, she scrambled to grab a cast-iron pan that had been swept onto the floor, and, with all her might, she slammed it into the back of his head; repeatedly. The Houk strained hurriedly, with a yelp, to throw her off, but Evaa held on with her knees and a hand clutching the hem of his shirt, and continued the assault, each time his head started to make its way up bashing it as hard as she could. After far too many strikes, there was a grisly crack, and the Houk groaned. Two more, and his protests ceased entirely. Evaa was slightly glad the spot still branded onto her vision covered her view.

She spun around, still brandishing the bloody and bent pan. As she watched peering around the cooking island, the Jedi, a bit emboldened, was closing in on the Human, dodging behind culinary cover to evade shots as he slowly inched his way forward. After another failed volley, the robber, frustrated beyond anything his malnourished visage could convey at this point, threw a volley of unflattering names at the Jedi instead, and resorted to a separate tactic: attempting to turn the environment against the enemy. He targeted a pipe running from the ceiling into the heater the Jedi was crouched next to, and fired. With an orange flare, flames burst forth from it, and Evaa could only assume the tibanna gas contained within had been ignited by the bolt. Fire licked the hem of the Jedi's robe and the far-too-flammable cloth caught fire. The Jedi yelped, the young cry of a child, and it pierced through Evaa's ears and brain in a strange way; as the Jedi was forced to pop out from his cover, Evaa threw the pan in her hand at the brute. She missed, the impromptu projectile flying past her target with a string of thick maroon blood trailing behind, but it was enough to make him flinch; the shot he'd had prepared for the Jedi veered away wildly. The Jedi cast off his flaming robe as the robber looked over to identify his assailant, and from the irate glance she could tell he considered her more of a nuisance not significant a threat enough to sway his obsession with the Jedi. He locked another shot onto him before he could get back into cover and fired. The Jedi successfully deflected it with his lightsaber and it flew away harmlessly past Evaa, but the robber had caught onto his opponent's rhythm, and another shot caught him on the edge of the thigh. With a cry, he fell to the floor, his lightsaber clattering to the ground and rolling under a sink. Evaa's heart lurched, even as the thug grinned almost derangedly and broke his pinning at gunpoint of the Jedi for a second to fire a potshot off at her. She ducked into cover, helpless to stop him as his footsteps stalked toward the boy on the floor, nearly obscured by the sound of the pot, still screaming in an infinite glissandic crescendo upwards.

"Well you've been a pain in the arse," she heard him sneer. "But that kriffin' lasersword of yours will be worth almost as much as the droid. And I don't have to share the proceeds now, thanks to your girlfriend." His malicious satisfaction was audible in his shrill voice. "I'll give 'er a blaster bolt in thanks when I'm done with you."

Evaa felt her stomach sinking into oblivion. There was nothing she could do.

The pot spluttered.

Something splashed.

The robber shrieked and discharges rang once more forth from his rifle. Evaa shot up before the pot had even clanged onto the floor to witness the robber's greasy hair soaked along with his shirt, exposed skin scarlet red, all steaming in a cloud of scalding vapor as he screamed in anguish, dropping his rifle from wet red hands to clutch his face. The Jedi had scuttled back, one hand outstretched, unharmed by the robber's newly blinded fire. The robber, still screeching with pain, stumbled back to trip over a rack the Houk had torn down, and he tumbled into a cabinet next to him. With the impact, a huge black metal cauldron that had been teetering dangerously on top of it, dislodged by an errant blaster bolt by the look of it, deposed from its spot, and it descended down directly on top of the robber's head. Evaa quickly looked away as it found its resting place and the screams abruptly ended.

The room was completely, strangely silent now; the shouting and the blasters and the whistling of the pot had all gone, laying bare nothing but Evaa and the Jedi's racing breath - and, something else, something she hadn't heard or noticed before. A strange, synthesized... whimper.

Evaa turned her head to the source of it, and sitting scrunched in the corner of the room as if hiding was a strange, all-white model of what appeared to be some sort of small utility droid, outfitted with somewhat makeshift, ill-fitting accessories seemingly designed to help with kitchen work, hobbling back in forth on its stumpy tracted legs and quietly making weird electronic whines. It turned its domed top to point a single large black orb of a photoreceptor at her, and made a low, veering noise, something that, if sounded from a sentient creature, would seem fearful.

Evaa stared blankly at it, then collapsed to the floor and put her head in her hands.


	4. Chapter 4

If Dhood had seen the Senator this flustered before, he couldn't remember it.

Of course, Kobald's expressions were the same for nearly every event that would normally merit a change in composure for most any other Human being. Over the months that Dhood had been interning for him, it had taken him an inordinate amount of time to crack into the rough riveted stone - appropriately like the cracked bluffs and hills of his home planet and the system he represented, Balmorra - that was Kobald's face. The dry ridges and uncompromising crags formed a visage as unreadable as an undeveloped moon that choked out any semblance of emotion that found its way to the surface. The wrinkles made it hardest - especially as occasionally another manifestation of the stress of his office would carve a new fault line under his eyes or across his cheek and overwrite one of the subtle signals Dhood had marked as a signifier, forcing him to start anew with his survey of the pockmarked landscape.

It was grueling work, and of course, Dhood wasn't paid for it.

But now it was as if an earthquake had stretched the features apart - not a high-magnitude one, no, one just enough to show the stress of the mantle beneath. His facial muscles splayed into a configuration even more gaunt than usual as the surface diverged at the lips of his mouth.

"Tomorrow?" he asked for confirmation, knowing the answer already.

"Yes," Mamari replied. Her stance in front of the Senator's desk conveyed annoyance more than dismay, but Dhood had known the Representative long enough to be aware that this development was as much a slap in the face to her as to the Senator.

"I was under the impression that tomorrow was a holiday."

"The Chancellor requested a hearing." Mamari looked down at the datatablet held to her chest, thumbing through it.

"There's no emergency, is there?"

"No, not that they've told us of."

Kobald sighed, the air rushing out from the narrow caverns beneath his mountainous nose as he reached up his hand to comb through the weak grey-and-white hairs on this head. "So I suppose I will have to postpone our trip home." The words fell like slow drops of cooling magma, melted under the simmering pressurized malcontent of the beneath but tamed and mostly hardened by the time they struck the air.

"Yes," Mamari replied bluntly, making no effort to pour cool water over the words. "Isn't it appropriate for the Senate to be in session on Republic Day?" She sat down across from Dhood at the utterance of the dry jab, continuing to fiddle with the datapad without so much as a glance at Dhood - as usual.

The attempt at humor impacted on the surface without illiciting so much as a crack. "No. Unless it is suddenly a holiday tradition to work government officials to death in celebration, in which case it's not any more special than the rest of the rotation."

"Seems to be a political statement," Mamari continued, crossing her legs in a manner that echoed discontent resignation to the reality of the situation. "Trying to signal that we're dedicated to the Galaxy's issues by working overtime. Especially on Republic Day."

Kobald's nose twitched ever so slightly. "If the Chancellor wishes to virtue signal, he can spend his holiday throwing credits to the wind on the streets himself. That would be to about the same effect as what he has had us doing anyway. And will sate the masses just as well." He paused, and Dhood strained to be able to perceive him reasserting authority over turmoil beneath. "What is on the schedule then?"

Mamari quickly swiped at the tablet. "Naboo's induction... the Black Market and Death Stick epidemic... the debt, again, of course, and..." She craned her neck closer to the screen as if to read something more accurately, and then the next words came with a tinge of surprise. "Senator Gand Organa is presenting his new bill."

Kobald's eyebrows rose like land arches over the deep sinkholes of his eye sockets. "Already? Did he not just announce it less than a week ago?" The brows furrowed together slightly like converging plates as he turned to the datascreen built into his desk, manipulating it with a long slender finger to find the piece referencing this information, despite the fact that if the file had just been released it was unlikely to have made it to his dashboard yet.

"He did." Mamari's lips pursed. "Alderaanians work fast."

Kobald read something on his screen, then looked away with a thin atmosphere of perturbedness. "Too fast. Maybe sloppiness will cause it not to pass the Committee. If the outlandishness of what it proposes doesn't turn them off first."

"It won't," Mamari reminded him. "If he can pass the Monetary Revitalization Act, he can get anything past them."

Kobald released his tentative, half-hearted grasp on his wishful thinking. "True, unfortunately. We'll have to defeat it on the floor, then." The stoicness had returned to his hardened landscape as calculations took place under the surface. "This gives us less time to ensure votes, of course. Especially with, Force forgiving that is, the rest of the holiday week having us out of session and on vacation. Undoubtedly intentional on Organa's part..."

Mamari's eyes narrowed as she looked up from the datapad and at Kobald, other signs of suspicion garnering foothold over her lank features. "Strange that Organa happens to have his bill ready the evening before a day we just now learned would have us in session. And one so inconvenient for us."

Kobald looked back at her, grey eyes glowing from within the mantle, then, after a moment, made a signal of dismissal with a hand. "If you're suggesting he coerced the Chancellor into this, I don't think the two of them are close enough, at least politically, for the Chancellor to make a special exception for his law. It's probably just luck on his part. And knowing Gand, of course he's going to take full advantage of it."

Mamari sighed, looking back down at the tablet almost disappointedly. "You're too trusting, Kobald."

"No, just reasonable," Kobald replied, spinning his chair slowly around to look out the wide floor-to-ceiling window of their room. The Coruscant skyline leered forth from behind the window pane, poised in front of a backdrop of grey; it had just been raining a few hours ago, and the clouds had so far refused to disperse, continuing to threaten another barrage of their acidic perspiration upon the cityscape below. The Senator was no doubt grimacing inwardly at the thought of spending another cycle on the drab, slick-wet metal surface of Coruscant, instead of on the sweeping plains and craggly mountains of Balmorra that he resembled like a child to a parent. It was the rainy season here; in the past, the great golden eras of the Old Republic, techniques had been utilized to modify and control the planet's climate into a permanent sunny room-temperature, absent of the passing of seasons. That equipment had been destroyed or fallen into decay during the Dark Ages, and more recent efforts to revive the ancient climate control mechanisms had been abandoned upon the Relapse when the companies that had been leased control over the projects had run out of financial support. So the rain still fell when it wanted to.

Although, of course, one of Organa's recent successes had put a sizable amount of discretionary funds towards revitalizing the project, with the reasoning that the technology would save the economy some vast amount of money normally spent on individual heating, cooling, lighting, sewage, etc. over a period of time. A section of one of Organa's bills that Kobald had fought viciously on the premise that it was a ridiculous, finacially wasteful pipe dream.

That was Kobald, of course. Pragmatic and conservative. Ever the skeptic. To a degree that tired Dhood, sometimes Mamari, and, it seemed often, even Kobald himself. And that certainly antagonized the other half of the Senate and on many issues even the politicians closer to his own partisanship.

And Dhood knew this same train of thought was likely running like an underground stream under Kobald's rocky exterior at the same time as he sat gazing at the gradually darkening clouds.

Kobald swivelled his chair to face Dhood, face its usual granite. "If the tours are occurring tomorrow as well, I assume it will be your turn to guide."

It was true as far as Dhood could tell. He'd been docketed to report for guide duty for the civilian tours through the Senate building, a post referred either to volunteers or interns, the day after the break, so he could only assume he'd now been pushed up to tomorrow. The thought did not please him; he'd been tasked with the duty a few times before during his stint here, and it was not a job he fit well into the mold of, but he had little choice in the matter, as he had as much bargaining power in this occupation as pay.

"Yes, I would guess so, Senator," Dhood confirmed nonetheless respectfully.

"Of course, also on a day of such importance, we're deprived of our intern," Kobald intoned smooth as marble, more in Mamari's general direction than Dhood's.

"Shouldn't be much of an issue," Mamari replied half-mindedly from where she sat silently pouting across from Dhood, reluctant to lend any energy to the conversation.

"I wouldn't say that. When it comes to Organa, it's best to have all the resources we can get." He turned back to Dhood. "Well, is that report I assigned to you compiled yet then?"

"Yes," Dhood answered, reaching to his lap to grab the datatablet nestled there. "That's what I was in here for." The tablet was handed off to Kobald, who received it with thin fingers and perused the display with a keen eye.

"Two billion." Kobald's eyebrows raised to new heights as he muttered the words he'd extracted from the display, then crashed down into furrows as his hand wandered up to cover his mouth in an expression of concentration.

"Yes, Senator," Dhood replied. He'd been as impressed by the number upon his first reading it as Kobald was now, though he'd likely showed a more potent amount of horror. "That's the number I was able to come up with. Past the actual attack and takeover, the volcanic eruptions that were triggered by the kinetic corrupter were massive, since it was already a very unstable planet. The ash covered the planet's atmosphere and caused an ice age. Then, mass famine, of course. And that figure's not counting those that were just noted as missing because the Sith took them as slaves, and they never returned."

Kobald continued reading in silence, while Dhood noticed that Mamari had taken note of the number as well, her interest shown to be piqued with a surprised expression. He turned to regard it, but as their eyes locked, Mamari quickly tore them away haughtily and relocated them to Kobald. "What? What planet is this? Why haven't I heard of it?"

Dhood's mouth was half-open to answer when Kobald undertook the explanation himself. "Scipio. A planet far in the Galactic North. Fitting for its climate. Not of particularly large note before the Wars, as I understand it was not even considered part of the Republic; the Scipians were a technologically half-developed race with little of note on their planet. But unfortunately for them, they were directly in the path of one of Warlord Odion's rampages."

Mamari stared, frowning. "I thought those things were a myth. The - kinetic corrupters."

"That's why Scipio has been so largely forgotten, it seems," Kobald responded grimly, still reading with the other three quarters of his mind. "But why did Odion take note of it?" he mused, vaguely towards Dhood.

Dhood helpfully answered, even though he'd already included this explanation in the document. "According to copies of the old records, the first explorers that made contact with Scipio noted very trace amounts of Baradium, not much more than you'd find on your average Core planet. Either Odion was so desperate he'd take anything he could get, or he just didn't care and wanted to spread destruction. Either way, the amount of Baradium was still more than enough for the kinetic corrupters he was using to harvest the stuff to trigger volcanic activity. Like I said, it was a very unstable planet. Very young."

Mamari eyed Dhood with an expression that covered her usual distaste under a layer of thoughtfulness. "So why do we suddenly care about them now?"

Kobald set the datapad aside, evidently satisfied with what he had read for now. Dhood felt a slight breath of relief whistle out between his lips. "A good question. A particular Scipian, who was taken as a slave by Odion upon the subjugation - they have long lifespans - and somehow survived, has been making waves around the Galaxy recently. He's been on HNN, done talks, and written a book that I've heard is an... incredibly interesting read. He's agitating for issues that his people face now, first and foremost."

"Like living on a snowball?" Mamari interjected, the attempt to drag a more in-depth explanation out of the as-usual understating Kobald finding its humor a bit tasteless in the context of the situation; that sort of facetiousness was typical for Mamari.

"Well, yes, that and then some." He clasped his hands from where they sat on the desk. "In any case, he's on Coruscant at the moment, trying to gain audience with the Senate or any official who will hear him out on the Scipians' issues. He's wanting to solicit aid for them. So I set our intern on the task of gleaning a bit more information."

Mamari looked at him quizzically. "You had him working on that? I mean, that's a lot of dead people, but it's not exactly pertinent to what we're focusing on right now."

"I was curious," Kobald stated simply, not defensively but matter-of-factly. "And if this Scipian is so intent on making his people's issues ours, it would be wise to have a bit more knowledge on them. Besides, you were the one who was just saying Dhood was too useless to be of consequence if he wasn't present tomorrow."

Mamari made a cross between a scowl and a rolling of the eyes at the Senator, though largely muffled by common decency and her clear respect for him. "I didn't say that." Dhood thought he could almost see her cheeks, suspended tightly between a regal high cheekbone and an unfittingly weak jaw, darken just a shade, and she shot Dhood a brief almost-glare as she stood up to her full nearly-imposing height, putting her datatablet on standby mode. "It's something you could have done yourself on your own time."

"What time?" Kobald fired back coolly as he in turn shut down his dashboard.

Mamari shrugged, conceding to that and ready to let the subject drop anyway. "I'm off. I suppose I should have a decent night's sleep for tomorrow."

"I would agree with that," Kobald responded. "I'll be following you in a bit, Representative."

Mamari nodded, gave a farewell to Kobald, and, disregarding Dhood, turned to make her way out of the office on long lank-but-shapely legs that were further augmented to an almost absurd degree by high heels. Dhood watched her go.

"Dhood." Kobald's voice rang through the now-empty office, and Dhood snapped his head back from where he realized he had had it fixed absentmindedly in the direction of the door.

"Yes, sorry Senator," Dhood answered, jerking his mind back to the here and now. He really shouldn't be slipping into the semi-consciousness of daydreaming like that; he didn't know what had gotten into him.

"No need," Kobald replied dismissively. "I'd like to transfer your report to my datapad."

"Of course," Dhood answered, standing to pull out a tether from his pocket and handing it to Kobald, who received it and affixed it between Dhood's machine and one the Senator had procured from his desk. "Ah..." Dhood suddenly found himself continuing perplexedly as he watched the data transfer. "Why, Senator?"

Kobald looked up, raising an eyebrow. "So I can read it tonight."

That took brief moment to click. The Senator had never shown enough interest in Dhood's work to take the time to mull over it in full, very much especially the precious off-time that he held so sacred and heralded as so scarce. "Oh. Thank you, Senator."

Kobald's expression didn't change from that of mildly engaged inquisitiveness. "Thank me for what?"

Dhood mentally kicked himself for the vapid and silly phrase he'd let slip. "No, nothing, Senator, never mind. I'm just... glad you find the report to your standards."

After a couple of seconds of studying Dhood, Kobald looked down as the datapad beeped completion. "It's plenty satisfactory, Dhood. An above-average job, as usual for you."

Dhood knew Kobald well enough to know that the statement wasn't really meant at all as a compliment, and Kobald's signature total-fact delivery of the line supported that assumption, but innerly Dhood couldn't help himself but to receive it as one. He allowed himself to savor a brief rush of satisfaction. "Thank you, Senator."

"No need," Kobald stonily replied. "Your reputation is deserved, simply put. Of course, I know Sobrik University only enrolls students of the utmost quality." The fact that he was referring to the school that he himself had graduated from was fair enough in the eyes of Dhood. Kobald drew himself up and outstretched his arm to return Dhood's datapad to him, eyes boring into him, and Dhood reclaimed it gratefully. "Speaking of which, I apologize on his behalf for the Chancellor's untimely calling of a session. Doubtless you were looking forward to returning home. And booking a new ship the day before will surely be agonizing."

Dhood was slightly surprised by the Senator's lightly salted apology; those weren't something he undertook very frequently even when he was being glib. But nonetheless, "No, it's fine, Senator. I didn't have a ship booked anyway."

Kobald showed surprise. Now the rock stretched apart to a degree that Dhood had never witnessed before - or been allowed to. "What? You weren't planning to return to Balmorra over the break?"

"No, Senator," Dhood responded. "I'd rather stay here on Coruscant over Republic Week."

"Really? I'd think a young man such as yourself... You don't have a woman?"

Dhood shook his head, smiling weakly.

"Surely you wish to see your family?"

Dhood repeated his prior gesture. "No. Well, all I have is my mother, and... we don't get along too well." Dhood paused as the Senator stared with what Dhood could interpret as disbelief mixed with something like pity, then quickly continued. "It's fine, Senator. I would enjoy myself more here on Coruscant."

After a moment Kobald finally relaxed his gaze. "I see. Well, suit yourself, though I can't imagine finding this place a pleasant spot to spend vacation." He looked over his shoulder out the window, where the glow of the sunset now began to weakly press through the thick grey wool of the clouds, and a quick flare of electricity lit up in a corner of the sky. Then he grasped his coat from the chair behind him and cast it around his thin wiry frame. "Let's be off. The sooner tomorrow comes and is over with - and it will be a long day - the sooner at least I can leave this accursed metal planet and return to Balmorra." He buttoned his coat, and Dhood as well threw on his jacket, and they exited the office together, Kobald taking a left at the door with a brief "good night" towards the official shuttles and Dhood a right towards a lift to the civilian-level exit of the Executive Building.

Tomorrow would, indeed, be a long day.


End file.
